Help? (nVidia drivers and other questions) :rolleyes:

Hi Linux people

I recently (yesterday) installed Ubuntu 9.04 onto a 4GB ExpressCard SSD, here is a screenshot of the HDTune benchmark:


On first attempt I accidentally turned it into the flash drive equivalent of the LiveCD, so I formatted it in Vista to clear up that mess. Then I used This guide over at PendriveLinux and it worked perfectly.

So far I have 3 gripes with it;
1) I cant get the nVidia drivers to install, I go to System >> Administation >> Hardware Drivers, in the window that comes up there are two drivers versions 173 and 180 (recommended) and I have tried to Activate each one, they both show the installing pop-up but upon restart nothing has changed.

2) From the HDTune results, is it normal for the boot-up time to be 2 minutes from selecting Persistent to showing the Desktop?

3) Not really a gripe but on checking the properties of my Filesystem it shows that it's using over 6GB, but it's only a 4GB SSD so where is the extra ~2GB. Also, when I load up windows from my HDD then it shows that the SSD only uses <2GB.

Thanks!

P.S. reps for you nice people

 

It would help if you post your system specs. I always use Envy-NG to install my Nvidia drivers(have not tried for ATI but it supposedly works for ATI too). Try it and see if it works. You can run "glxgears" from terminal before and after to see if there is a difference.

 

Oh sorry, specs are in my sig, is that enough info?

Also, bigger problem now, I used the Synaptic Program Installer Utility and search for 180 (the driver version) and installed most things with that came up (I read it on another forum that I can't remember because the URL is stored in Ubuntu). Then on reboot, the bootloader(?) froze at about 25%, so I turned it off and rebooted again. This time it got past the bootloader(?) but afterwards it showed a window in the top left saying "failed to initialize HAL!", the mouse and touchpad didn't work so had to shutdown again. :s Will do a quick search around google, then try again.

Seeing as I have not made many changes, would it be easier just to reformat the SSD in Vista and try again?

 

You messed up big time. You need to select the latest (180) and let it detect your card and do it's magic. It'll show a progress bar which might go slowly and then you just restart and everything is cool. Make sure only the 180 driver is working. Also, you probably broke the "communication between your HAL (reads gfx card) and OS" so even though you can do some easy work in the terminal to fix what you broke, you're new to linux and I think you're the lazy type who likes things on a platter for them so just grab your files from Ubuntu from within windows and re-install. =\

 

Wait a second, that's exactly what I did, I didn't mess up!

Oh, I cant even get to the Terminal, it just hangs on the HAL error.

I'll reinstall,

 

Tried pressing Alt+F2? I don't even think you'd get that far with a broken HAL though. Search up on Google, and try looking through UbuntuForum's if you're adventurous. If you fix it (find your problem and fix it) then I'll give you a cookie.

 

I've searched Google and Ubuntu Forums and the HAL is something to do with hardware, but the problem seems to be different in each case.

I've only had Ubuntu for a day, cut me some slack

 

Here's the screenie Calveen:

 

Sorry, I didn't see the specs. I just kind of skip over sigs.